What is Perl's secret of getting small code do so much?

Posted by sak on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sak
Published on 2010-04-11T12:31:38Z Indexed on 2010/04/11 12:43 UTC
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Filed under:

perl

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obfuscation

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code-golf

I've seen many (code-golf) Perl programs out there and even if I can't read them (Don't know Perl) I wonder how you can manage to get such a small bit of code to do what would take 20 lines in some other programming language.

What is the secret of Perl? Is there a special syntax that allows you to do complex tasks in few keystrokes? Is it the mix of regular expressions?

I'd like to learn how to write powerful and yet short programs like the ones you know from the code-golf challenges here. What would be the best place to start out? I don't want to learn "clean" Perl - I want to write scripts even I don't understand anymore after a week.

If there are other programming languages out there with which I can write even shorter code, please tell me.

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